Cantando, ricevano intra le foglie,
Che tenevan bordone alle sue rime
Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie
Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi
Quand' Eolo Scirocco fuor discioglie.

With these verses in our minds, while wandering down the grassy
aisles, beside the waters of the solitary place, we seem to meet that
lady singing as she went, and plucking flower by flower, 'like
Proserpine when Ceres lost a daughter, and she lost her spring.'
There, too, the vision of the griffin and the car, of singing
maidens, and of Beatrice descending to the sound of Benedictus and of
falling flowers, her flaming robe and mantle green as grass, and veil
of white, and olive crown, all flashed upon the poet's inner eye, and
he remembered how he bowed before her when a boy. There is yet another
passage in which it is difficult to believe that Dante had not the
pine-forest in his mind. When Virgil and the poet were waiting in
anxiety before the gates of Dis, when the Furies on the wall were
tearing their breasts and crying, 'Venga Medusa, e si 'l farem di
smalto,' suddenly across the hideous river came a sound like that
which whirlwinds make among the shattered branches and bruised stems
of forest-trees; and Dante, looking out with fear upon the foam and
spray and vapour of the flood, saw thousands of the damned flying
before the face of one who forded Styx with feet unwet. 'Like frogs,'
he says, 'they fled, who scurry through the water at the sight of
their foe, the serpent, till each squats and hides himself close to
the ground.' The picture of the storm among the trees might well have
occurred to Dante's mind beneath the roof of pine-boughs. Nor is there
any place in which the simile of the frogs and water-snake attains
such dignity and grandeur. I must confess that till I saw the ponds